Wednesday, November 17, 2010

FUSE Lab’s Montage – Blending Social Media content to Create and Share a Visual Album of the web

Montage from FUSE labs is a flexible web-based service that makes it fun and easy to create and share a visual album of the web on the topics you care about. You can design your Montage around any topic you can imagine by adding content that pulls information from a variety of sources, including RSS feeds, Twitter, Bing News, and YouTube. (EDIT: At present Montage pulls from twitter, Bing news and Images, rss feeds, YouTube and Vimeo )

This is so cool ! Suppose you wanted to create a page with some topic you want. Montage does it in a jiffy using the Bing Search as it pulls news RSS feeds contents, photos, Tweets, Bing News, YouTube videos etc from the web. And the best part is you can design them to put it on a page very easily and these can be static or dynamic getting the latest which keeps on changing as the information arrives. Even you can add your content from your Blog while designing the page. And these can saved to the Montage gallery on the cloud. And this look very cool , you have to check them to get an idea.

And it also provides option to share, Retweet , embed them as a blog post etc

It reminds me a bit of Flipboard – an iPad App , which was in the news few months back but Montage looks more cooler as Montage allows us to design the contents and then can share, RT ,embed etc to further socialize it. Give it a look.

At present its not available to all and only a select few partners have the ability to build and share Montages but anyone who wants to view a Montage can. There are lots of Montage gallery present for viewing and all these can arranged in many ways using Filters.

For example a Montage on Google TV looks like this -

And here’s another Montage on President Obama’s visit to India-

Looks great as if reading a magazine or ready for publishing , all created easily by you. And these can be dynamic as the content change as it gets more new content so one has to check it to experience it.

Richard Feynman wrote a book called “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.”

He was talking about the thrill scientists get when curiosity leads to scientific discovery. It makes me wonder what “finding things out” means in a world of social media, large data sets, and ever richer online experiences—and how we can use them to create a search experience that is magical.

Two new FUSE projects explore new ways of finding things out – new ways to experience the kind of data that flows through social networks and the web. These projects are based on three questions:

2 comments:

No..no. Please visit http://montage.cloudapp.net/ There you'll have lots of readymade montages in various categories to view .One of them was about GoogleTV , I just took that example.

Suppose you want some topic to share with others, using Montage you can prepare it in a beautiful way quickly pulling various info from different Social networks. Check the examples of already prepared montages.